Aquadrill Brand Guidelines: Seadrill Partners, a 2021 Rename & a 2023 Return to Seadrill

An asset-holding unit of Seadrill.

Aquadrill began life as Seadrill Partners LLC, a rig-owning company tied closely to the offshore driller Seadrill. Offshore Energy described it in 2021 as an asset-holding unit of Seadrill Limited, and its own releases, issued from London, named its dependence on Seadrill for management and technical support as a business risk. English Wikipedia records that in May 2013 Seadrill sold the tender rigs T-15 and T-16 and the West Vencedor to Seadrill Partners.

By 2014 the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SDLP. In July 2014 it agreed with Seadrill to buy a further 28 per cent of Seadrill Operating LP, raising its stake to 58 per cent, its release said. Seadrill Operating held interests in three ultra-deepwater rigs, the West Aquarius, West Leo and West Cappella, and in the semi-tender rig West Vencedor. The structure let Seadrill Partners own rigs while Seadrill ran them.

The listing did not last. On 6 September 2019 the company said the New York Stock Exchange had suspended trading in its common units and begun delisting proceedings because of its low market capitalisation; the units moved to the over-the-counter market under the ticker SDLPF, and the company said it intended to appeal.

On 1 December 2020, after negotiations with an ad hoc group of lenders under its term loan, Seadrill Partners filed voluntary petitions under Chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code, with the support of that group. Its release said it would use the process to meet customer, supplier and employee obligations without interruption and to complete a consensual restructuring of its debt. It emerged from Chapter 11 in May 2021, Offshore Energy reported, and new management services agreements were put in place for its rigs.

A new name and three managers.

The new name arrived quietly. On 15 July 2021 a company called Aquadrill LLC, writing from London, announced a one-well contract with Equinor for the drillship Vela in the US Gulf of Mexico, to run from October 2021 to April 2022. Offshore Energy asked Seadrill about the connection, and a Seadrill spokesperson said Aquadrill was Seadrill Partners’ new name. The Vela, the magazine reported, is a sixth-generation drillship of a Samsung 12,000 design, built in 2013 by Samsung Heavy Industries in South Korea.

The rig names changed too. In Seadrill Partners’ 2014 release the rigs carried Seadrill’s “West” prefix; in the Aquadrill period trade reports name them simply Aquarius, Leo, Capella, Polaris and Vela. Aquadrill did not run its rigs itself. Seadrill managed and operated the Vela. In March 2021, while the company was still in Chapter 11, Vantage Drilling was approved as manager of four floaters, the Polaris and Capella drillships and the Leo and Sirius semisubmersibles, Offshore Energy reported, and in January 2022 Vantage agreed to manage and market the Aquarius, a harsh-environment semisubmersible built in 2009 and previously managed by Odfjell Drilling. Diamond Offshore managed two more, the Auriga drillship, built in 2013, and the Capricorn semisubmersible, built in 2011.

The fleet also shrank. In October 2021 Aquadrill’s fleet status report showed the Sirius, a semisubmersible built in 2008, as sold, and the Leo went to BW Energy to be repurposed as a floating production unit for the Kudu gas field offshore Namibia, Offshore Energy reported. In the same month Aquadrill agreed a two-well contract in Indonesia for the Capella, one well for Premier Oil Andaman and one subcontracted to Repsol Andaman, with the rig moving from Malaysia to start work in the first quarter of 2022.

Design and documentation.

Offshore drilling contractors sell time on rigs rather than goods in a shop, so their public identity is built around the fleet. Their websites tend to pair plain corporate wordmarks, often in navy, red or orange, with large photographs of drillships, semisubmersibles and jack-ups at sea, published by the companies themselves.

The rig is the working unit of the brand. Contractors commonly give each rig its own page with a short run of specifications: the design, the water depth it is rated for, how deep it can drill, how many people it can house, and where and for whom it is working. Shelf Drilling’s fleet page, for example, gives every one of its jack-ups the same set of fields. Rig names often share a prefix or a word, so that the company name travels with each unit from contract to contract.

Fleet-status reports are the other recurring document, listing rigs with their current customers, locations and contract periods for investors and clients. When Noble Corporation completed its acquisition of Diamond Offshore in September 2024, it published an updated fleet status report alongside the announcement, The Maritime Executive reported. Operating-region maps sit next to them, placing rigs in waters from the North Sea to West Africa and Southeast Asia.

Investor pages complete the picture, because the sector has been reshaped by restructurings and mergers. Diamond Offshore went through Chapter 11 in 2020 and 2021 and became part of Noble in 2024; Shelf Drilling became part of ADES in 2025. For designers, these companies show a corporate identity carried by rig names, specification sheets, fleet reports and maps rather than by packaging or retail.

Back into the Seadrill family.

Aquadrill traded under its own name for less than two years. On 22 December 2022 Seadrill agreed to acquire it in an all-stock transaction. gCaptain reported that the boards of both companies had approved the deal, that Seadrill shareholders would hold 62 per cent of the combined company and Aquadrill unitholders 38 per cent, and that the combined business would keep the name Seadrill Limited and stay domiciled in Hamilton, Bermuda. Seadrill’s chief executive spoke of the two companies’ shared heritage; Aquadrill’s chief executive said the combination would create an excellent platform for service to customers.

The deal closed in early April 2023. Offshore Energy reported on 4 April 2023 that Seadrill had completed the acquisition of Aquadrill, “formerly known as Seadrill Partners,” and that Aquadrill had become a wholly owned subsidiary of Seadrill; English Wikipedia also gives April 2023 for the closing. Seadrill’s chief executive spoke of “welcoming its fleet back into the Seadrill family.” The combined company, Seadrill said, would own 12 floaters, including seven seventh-generation drillships, three harsh-environment rigs, four jack-ups for benign waters and three tender-assisted rigs, with seven more rigs managed under partnerships. Since then Aquadrill has not operated as an independent company.

As a brand, Aquadrill was mainly a new name for a company that began as a Seadrill unit and returned to Seadrill. Its releases kept the plain format of an investor notice: a London dateline, a contract or fleet update in a few sentences, then forward-looking statements. The new name dropped the word Seadrill, and the rigs dropped the “West” prefix they had shared with Seadrill’s fleet.

For a design guide, Aquadrill shows how a rig owner can take a new name after a restructuring and still be judged by the names of its rigs and the companies that run them. Compare Seadrill, its former parent, which absorbed it in 2023, and Vantage Drilling, which managed its rigs. For this guide we use an abyss teal, a pale sea foam and a buoy coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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